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Our Team
Gary Brooks, Managing Director, Central Fund
Casson Rosenblatt, Program Associate
Kerwin Tesdell, President
Kelly Williams, Consultant
Gary Brooks, CMC, CTP is the Managing Director of the CDVCA Central Fund. He is a nationally recognized turnaround consultant and crisis manager. He has over 40 years of diversified executive management and consulting experience. As Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Allomet Partners, Ltd., he has provided restructuring, interim management and refinancing services to more than 400 companies.
He has served as the National Chair of the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC). He is a founding member of the Turnaround Management Association (TMA) and served as a member of its Board of Directors for eight years. He was first Chair of TMA’s Certification Committee responsible for designing and implementing the Certification Program leading to the CTP designation. He was first President of the Association of Certified Turnaround Professionals (ACTP).
His career affiliations include the General Electric Company, Eastman Kodak, and the Scott Paper Company, where he served as a Division Executive managing a subsidiary. Prior to the formation of Allomet Partners, he managed the New York office of an international firm specializing in strategic planning and technological forecasting, and served as Managing Principal of a major New England-based turnaround consulting firm for eight years.
Of the many enterprises that Allomet assists (including their lenders, investors, directors, etc), a substantial percent of the work relates to family businesses--adding a far reaching human dimension to the traditional financial equation faced by troubled middle market ($10 to $200 million in revenue) businesses. Mr. Brooks often serves as a facilitator to help family members benefit from alternative means of dispute resolution. Allomet's involvement in these cases offers a new (sometimes only) means by which the barriers among all concerned parties can be lowered and efforts toward resolving the issues can begin. In addition to his role as an advisor to owners and managers, Gary Brooks is often asked to serve as the interim Chief Operating Officer of an underperforming enterprise.
Currently, Mr. Brooks is a member of the Board of Directors of Diomed Holdings, Inc. (Amex), the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (New York) and VRSim, a virtual reality development stage company.
Gary Brooks writes frequently for publication in journals serving the profession and lectures often to such groups as the Family Firm Institute, Private Wealth workshops, and at numerous Chapter and National meetings of TMA. He has also served as Visiting Professor at a number of schools of business administration.
Gary Brooks graduated from MIT where he majored in Biochemical Engineering and Industrial Management and he received an MS degree from the University of Rochester (NY) in Chemical Engineering and Operations Research.
Casson Rosenblatt is Program Associate for CDVCA. She is responsible for communications, including the newsletter, website and other publications, and assisting with advocacy, business development, research and consulting.
Prior to joining CDVCA, Ms. Rosenblatt was an economic analyst at Roubini Global Economics and the Managing Editor of its website, RGE Monitor. In this position she managed a team of seven editors charged with researching, analyzing and aggregating over 90 topics related to global macroeconomics and geostrategy. She was also co-author of a quarterly report on China’s foreign exchange reserves. Her career also includes work with the U.S. Treasury Department and a small Tibetan NGO, the Snowland Service Group, where she had the opportunity to participate in projects such as yak loans to local nomads.
Casson graduated from Yale College with a degree in East Asian Studies and holds an M.A. in International Affairs from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a division of Johns Hopkins University.
Kerwin Tesdell is president of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University, teaching Double Bottom Line Finance at the Stern School of Business and Community Development Law at the School of Law.
Prior to joining CDVCA, Mr. Tesdell was a program officer at the Ford Foundation, first in its office of program-related investments and then in its economic development unit, where he had primary responsibility for the Foundation’s work in small business finance and job creation for low income people. Before that, he was the director of the Community Development Legal Assistance Center, which provides corporate, tax, and real estate legal assistance to community development organizations in New York. He was also an associate with the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, where he represented a variety of clients in the financial services industry, including venture capital firms and an individual angel capitalist. He also performed the legal work in organizing the Community Capital Bank, one of the first community development banks in the nation. Prior to joining Debevoise, he was a law clerk to a federal judge in Manhattan.
Mr. Tesdell is chairman of the board of the CDFI Coalition and vice chair of the CDFI Data Project. He serves on the Board of Directors, Executive Committee and Investment Committee of the New York Community Investment Company, LLC, a CDVC fund. He also serves on the Advisory Boards of the Journal of Tax Credit Investment, the Satter Center for Social Entrepreneurship at NYU, the RISE Project of Columbia Business School, and the Milano Finance Lab of the New School for Social Research.
Mr. Tesdell graduated from Harvard College with a degree in economics and holds JD and MBA degrees from New York University, as well as a certificate from the Venture Capital Institute.
Ms. Williams is responsible for overseeing CDVCA’s training and policy programs, and serves as CDVCA’s general counsel and membership director. Ms. Williams has been a consultant at CDVCA since 1999, and is the author of two white papers on angel investing, co-author of white paper on state tax policies to encourage equity capital formation, and a book, Working with Angel Investors for Community Development: Analysis, Best Practices and Case Studies.
Prior to beginning work at CDVCA, she was Legal Counsel for Union Bank of Switzerland's securities subsidiary, and before that was an attorney at Cleary, Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York City for six years, specializing in corporate finance. Kelly has a B.A. in Political Science from Tufts University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law.
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